Are all your screens switched off? Are you ready for another pondering prompt by Tyrean Martinson? Then, what do you come up with when reading “In the Wide, Waiting Land?”
First of all, I thought this might be a line from another poem. I found the Arizona March Song with the line “Where the wide, wide world is waiting”. But I have never been to Arizona, and I only come up with clichés such as sunshine, desert, and cacti … and that is embarrassing.
The next I came up with was the name of Dervla Murphy, a renowned Irish touring cyclist who wrote lots of traveling books, one of them called “The Waiting Land”, a book about her experiences in Nepal. As a teenager, I had a pen pal in Kathmandu, a boy who was a few years older than I. We wrote to each other for years, and I read up what books our public libraries had about Nepal and its culture and religion. It was fascinating. He wanted to know as much about Germany; he was even trying to learn the language. Then, a terrible earthquake with mudslides over there – my last letter was returned to me. He had been only at the threshold of adulthood. He had been as serious a kid as I was. Above all, he had opened my mind for a nation that was so entirely different from anything I knew then … and this friendship and the knowledge I gathered over the years because of it are still a treasure I covet.
Much later, I started traveling all by myself. All kinds of countries and cultures. Nothing as adventurous as Dervla Murphy had done. My “wildest” thing was probably the 60-mile coastal path on the British Island of Guernsey – I hiked it all alone and, back then, I didn’t even have a cell phone. If anything had happened, I’d have had to wait for the next hiker coming by.
“Wide and waiting” to me was all about understanding the history and variety of cultures in Europe, anything within comfortable reach. “Wide, waiting land” had never been Nepal or similar far-away destinations. During my last years in Germany, shortly before I met my husband-to-be, I made it a point to explore my mother country region by region – because I wanted to know the land that lay at my doorstep. How could I tell people about the country that had shaped me if I didn’t even know it that well myself?!
Exploring was always a thing with me. I was incredibly enthused when I found that the love of my life was on the same page with me. Though Europe is currently a bit off our traveling map, we find that the Pacific Northwest is very much such a “wide, waiting land”. No weekend when we don’t try to find something that we haven’t done before or a place where we haven’t been before. We usually manage. It’s all so easy. Even if you don’t have a car to get around, there are buses that carry you to a place that you can explore. Or if you aren’t able to walk, there are books and movies that help you explore what’s around you.
Have you been to all the state parks in your state? Have you seen all the waterfalls? Visited all the small towns? Been on the beach and in the mountains? Seen all the lakes? Visited all the museums? If you are willing to dig deep into detail, even comparatively small areas become truly wide. It doesn’t have to be far or exotic or expensive. For we all live in a wide land that is waiting to connect with us.
